ISPO 2026 adds new padel and pickleball village in Amsterdam

ISPO will add a dedicated Padel & Pickleball Village when it moves to Amsterdam RAI for its 2026 edition, a sign the racket-sports business has grown from a side attraction into prime real estate. The show is scheduled for 3-5 November 2026, with a leaders summit on 3 November and the expo on 4-5 November, and ISPO says it will bring together more than 25,000 industry professionals.

The new village is being billed as a high-energy, fully integrated exhibition and activation space built to connect brands with buyers, distributors, media and the wider racket-sports ecosystem. International Padel Cluster is backing the move as part of a broader push to give padel its own commercial stage inside one of the sport industry’s biggest trade events, while also folding in pickleball for the same audience.

That pairing is the key business question. On one hand, padel and pickleball are drawing overlapping buyers from clubs, court construction, equipment, and tech, so one shared village could widen the funnel fast. On the other, putting the two sports under one roof can also read as a reality check: padel may be hot, but ISPO is still choosing to package it alongside another breakout sport rather than grant it a standalone hall. For brands trying to sell rackets, surfaces, lighting, booking software, and facility builds, the Amsterdam format should deliver more foot traffic and more cross-category meetings. For operators, it creates a direct line to the manufacturers and service providers shaping the next round of club investment.

The move also shows how far ISPO has already traveled on racket sports. In Munich, the show had a smaller padel footprint, including two pádel courts in 2023, and its Padel Village programming ran from 28 to 30 November 2023 with live demonstrations and activations. By 2023 and 2024, that had already expanded from a courts concept into a more developed village format, and the 2026 version now scales that idea up in Amsterdam. ISPO has repeatedly framed padel as one of the world’s fastest-growing sports with growing economic relevance, while also calling pickleball the fastest-growing sport and a billion-dollar industry.

The new ISPO format is being led by Raccoon Media Group in partnership with Messe München, and the Amsterdam launch will be the clearest test yet of whether padel has become an established global sports category or still needs pickleball’s momentum to amplify its commercial reach.